abednarz.net

So I admit, as recently pointed out to me, this blog has been pretty boring lately, focusing primarily on my articles at The Apple Blog, and updates to my little iPhoneOS app that rotates photos. Thusly I will henceforth try and amend the issue, beginning now, although since this post is called “What Bed’s Been Doing Lately” and I’ve been doing what many consider pretty boring stuff, I may not succeed.

Firstly my full time job of the last 12 years is still keeping me busy, managing my small software team producing Windows and Windows Mobile software for the retail market. 12 years of working with barcode scanners. Still, I have been pushing the sales team towards these babies, because it would be immensely more fun writing software for a well designed platform, as opposed to Windows Mobile.

I know this because most of my after-hours time lately has been spent deep within XCode cooking up Cartoon Studio for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. We are currently in version 1.0 feature freeze and are a brewing up something that is hopefully full of spit, polish and shiney. Speaking of spit and polish, I have a post about just that over at HawksBed Studios. HawksBed studios is the company founded by myself and my good friend Bort (of Twitter and FARK fame). We make a good team since I can implement things, but have no ideas, while he can’t implement anything but is full of ideas. The first (of many) ideas is Cartoon Studio and we think that so far we’re on track for something exciting. Check us out and if you’re interested in joining our wider (but still private) beta release let us know.

Meanwhile, back in March, an old friend was resurrected: PCW Entertainment. When I first discovered them in 2001 they had a big impact on me. Sure, Professional Wrestling is not a legitimate competitive sport, it is theatre. But it is physical theatre and very much so. As I trained to be a referee, learning how to take bumps and flip around I found a great respect for all of these athletes and new found ability within myself that I could do anything I wanted to, if I wanted it badly enough (even become a local tag team champion being thrown off the top of the ringpost through a table and loving it; me, a geek who avoided all exercise at all costs). So when PCW announced their return I gladly got in touch and asked “what can I do?”. They’re a good bunch of people and if you’re like me and avoid the politics, never a drama. I was back doing commentary with the excellent Christopher Bayliss in March and had a great time. The next show is coming up on the 15th May – if you’re in Melbourne Australia, enjoy WWE or TNA and have never seen local independent pro wrestling – you’re missing out.

Finally, coming back to geeky stuff, I thought a small analysis of the sales figures for Photo Rotate over the last year would be interesting. Obviously such a small utility app was not going to let me retire, in-fact I would have been happy to have recovered the cost of the iPhone developer program. But as you can see it’s been some OK pocket money. What’s more interesting is that even with tiny daily sales, where the ‘sales spikes’ occur are pretty clear:

Click to make larger

Nothing surprising, but interesting. And on that note I need to stop writing and get back to doing what I’ve been doing most lately, putting spit and polish on Cartoon Studio.

After many years of hosting abednarz.net in the US with an uber-cheap hosting provider, I have moved to an Australian host. While a tiny bit more expensive, the uber-cheap came with a few niggly issues that, over 5 years have been too annoying. Faster maintenance being hosted locally, plus support hours that match my hours should make it all worthwhile. Bits and pieces may be missing for the next few days while I ensure everything is copied over.

On Monday, I succumbed to the iPhone. I certainly haven’t been disappointed – it makes my old windows mobile (running wm6.1) feel like a 386 with windows 3.1.

So this post is being written on it with the wordpress app – really just because I can.

It really is the device I’ve been wanting for the last few years and it has completely lived up to the hype for me.

More Apple KoolAid down my hatch.

Since we develop Windows applications at work, its now starting to become more common for clients to be running Vista. We found our first compatibility issue last week – performing ICMP pings that worked on XP nolonger worked – the API actually failed.

One of the quickest ways to find problems, is for the development enviroment to be moved from XP to Vista. So relunctantly, I am seting up a Vista Business virtual machine for this purpose.

I was quite suprised, however to discover that my Bed’s Printer Switcher application works perfectly in it. I was impressed to discover that OSX did this all for me – I don’t know if Vista does (it bloody well SHOULD), but if it doesn’t at least that will work without fiddling.

I’m so very impressed with WordPress, especially the inter-connectivity plugins for LiveJournal and now I found this one for Facebook. I like everything being connected, its the smart way of the future.